Peeing in the Bush

by Adeline Loh

  One such incident was when Daniel spied with his one little eye – or at least swore to God he did – a cheetah cub through the undergrowth of an escarpment in the middle distance. All excited, we zoomed to a clearing where Daniel asked to borrow Chan’s binos for the hundredth time to confirm the sighting. He laid off mine after branding it an inferior made-in-China cheapie. (He wasn’t wrong.) When Chan failed to respond, he craned his neck back and fixed his eyes expectantly at her. She feigned ignorance and blinked at him open-mouthed.

  ‘Can I have a look through your binos, please?’ he asked her flatly.

  Chan wasn’t about to give it up without creating some sort of drama. She put on a big show of freeing the binoculars from her neck, and acted all sad as if she was giving away her only head of broccoli in a month.

  Daniel snatched it hastily and immediately adjusted the diopter lens. ‘Nope, no cheetah there. Both of you should throw your cheap binos away and get new ones.’

  ‘Oh, should we get something like your non-existent one?’ I said.

  He pretended not to hear me.

  As far as I knew, the act of sharing binoculars went against every rule in the safari etiquette book. Not having your own binoculars was akin to eating with someone else’s fork. So it goes without saying that no wilderness guide worth his salt would dare enter a national park and lead an excursion without his own pair of industry-standard binoculars. No guide we had encountered, anyway – but that was how Daniel wanted to be different.

  Well, Chan had just about had it with his nonsense. I was surprised she had lasted this long without blowing her top. But tread on a worm and it will turn, and the vein throbbing in her temple gave me the hint that she could not contain her seething resentment any longer.

  ‘Why can’t that hairy ape get his own damned binos?’ she exploded in Cantonese, her face incandescent with rage. ‘Half the time he’s hanging on to mine! I hate it whenever he adjusts the lens! Can’t he see I’m bloody short-sighted? I find it so irritating that I’ve to adjust it back all the time! By the time I finally get a clear image and search for whatever you’re looking at, it’s gone!’

  I empathized, but there was not much we could do. He had little to zero depth perception since he was missing an eye, so loaning him the binoculars was the only way he could identify new species for us from afar. I motioned for her to share my binos but she was inconsol­able after venting her spleen.

  ‘Take deep breaths, Chan,’ I whispered.

  She rummaged through her fanny pack and took out a string of japa mala beads.

  ‘Oh, good idea, Chan. That will help calm you down. Just chant some soothing mantras and relax.’

  Chan closed her eyes and started mumbling to herself. ‘I’m going to strangle him ... I’m going to strangle him ... I’m going to strangle him with these beads ...’

  Although Chan did not follow through with exacting a terrible revenge, a billion tiny, ugly winged things came along and did it for her. As we drove on, with our windows wide open, the guys began slapping their necks and whacking their exposed arms with increasing frequency. That could only mean one thing: dreaded tsetse flies – the bane of all safaris. Attracted to the dust churned up by our moving vehicle (and the people in it), the little bloodsucking fiends were fast invading the van and penetrating our defensive clothing systems.

  Luckily for Chan and me, the over-chummy bugs were partial to black and preferred to swarm the guys. Even so we were not entirely spared, and with sewing needle-like stingers, the flies had absolutely no problem eating me through my shirt and thick army utility pants. But that was not why they were frequently glorified in natural his­tory horror stories. Looking twice as big and grotesque as the normal housefly, the tsetse fly unselfishly passes on sleeping sickness, also known as African trypanosomiasis. When this vector-borne parasitic disease invades your bloodstream, you will fall asleep in the day but lie awake all night. Terrific for graveyard-shift workers, you might say, but ultimately the parasite starts to infect the brain and turn its membranes into mildly chilled yogurt. That is before imminent heart failure kicks in and then you die. Not very salutary, really.

  A trillion painfully itchy welts later, we pulled up to Lufupa Lodge’s spacious camping lawn littered with tents and parked next to the only thatched shelter left unoccupied. Under it was a wooden picnic table and a barbecue pit with firewood, facing the beatific confluence of the Kafue and Lufupa rivers. Too bad we couldn’t enjoy the alluring setting yet because we could not see a thing. Like everywhere else we’d been, we had arrived late at night and had to hustle to erect our flimsy digs by the light of the van’s headlamps.

  When the tent bag was opened, I realized Daniel had neglected to inform us that the shoddy, windowless tent inside had been in use since ancient times. Piecing together the sorry excuse for a movable shelter was an exasperating struggle that had me spewing expletives like an unruly fishmonger’s wife. What’s more, when we finally got the family-sized tent up, it stood lopsided because three of the pole ends wouldn’t peg down all the way even though Daniel had pounded them in with a large filthy rock.

  ‘Hmm ... there’s hardly any wind now so the tent should stay upright. As long as your bags are inside, it won’t topple over,’ said Daniel matter-of-factly, as if it were perfectly normal to have a tent close to collapsing.

  Chan and I stared at him like he’d just killed our pets. Easy for him to say – he was going to spend the night in the van with Steven.

  Us two became filled with more dread upon discovering that the zips of the tent’s entrance were jammed. The big gaping hole in front was virtually inviting bugs of all inclinations to drop in for an all-you-can-eat human buffet. Not to mention the freezing-to-death scenario. In haste, we grabbed a sleeping bag liner and frantically covered the hole with it as fast as possible before bloodthirsty insects could enter. After liberal fussing and cussing, we succeeded marginally. The tent was patched up with three tiny safety pins (which I had almost tossed out of my backpack because of the, um, extra weight). Still, with all the fiddling around with zips, folding the liner at very precise angles, and then removing and fastening the pins each time we needed to get in or out – Chan became an even unhappier camper than she ever was to begin with.

  *

  Setting off for Busanga Plains at 7 a.m., I was surprised to hear Daniel mention that it was his first time going up north when I distinctly remembered him telling me that he had been there countless times. Geez, if you’re going to lie, at least be good at it. Anyhow, it was all well and good – I loved that we practically had this wonderful section of Kafue all to ourselves. As we traversed the extensive plains, we hardly came into contact with any other safari vehicle, and we felt free to whoop hysterically at the joyous sightings of near-endemic red lechwes, defassa waterbucks and black wildebeests.

  Other times, it felt like we were drowning in a vast sea of ochre grassland that seemed to go on forever. When mammalian distrac­tions were scarce and infrequent, I counted how many grams of dirt I’d accidentally swallowed through the open window, untangled my windblown hair and cleaned out my gritty eyes. Meanwhile Chan showed her keen enthusiasm in her endearingly inimitable way: by snoring and slobbering on her binoculars.

  I jostled her back to life when we passed several large areas completely dominated by knobbly termite mounds. We were posi­tively awestruck gazing out at these natural edifices of the forest which erupted from the landscape like a severe case of acne, often stretching for a kilometre at a time and rising up to three metres, though we spotted some pinnacles that towered as high as eight metres. Even more astonishing were the huge wrinkly trees which grew on top of them, some possibly as old as a few centuries. The locals like termite mounds because the grainy soil inside is excellent for building mud huts. Occasionally, a termite mound would get startled and trot off – all right, they were really warthogs. It was hard to tell the difference since they were both the same shade of grey.

  To escape the leth
argy caused by the midday heat, we drove to Treetops Conservation School Camp for some well-earned nourish­ment. In spite of its decrepit appearance, Treetops is an important institution that trains and educates young Zambians about bush conservation. Why, just at the entrance, we were treated to our first lesson: a ring of animal skulls displayed neatly on the ground. To be honest, it was a wee bit disturbing seeing the bleached bones of waterbuck, rhino, buffalo, hippo, puku and impala arranged around the astonishingly large cranium of an elephant. The only thing missing from the picture was a spitting witchdoctor casting an odd juju spell with a bottle of milk and a headless chicken.

  A short distance from the main building was another enormously bizarre spectacle: the baobab tree, Africa’s oldest and longest-living inhabitant. The awesome specimen here had a weather-beaten copper trunk that was a gripping, towering swollen mass of muscle, tendon and bulging vein – the diameter of which I guessed to be about five metres or over 1,000 years of age. Some baobabs had even been carbon-dated to as far back as 3,000 years – that’s before Jesus was in diapers.

  Steeped in myth and reverence, the baobab is one of the strangest and most memorable trees you will ever encounter because it looks like its having a bad hair day. Tribal legend has it that when the world was created, the Great Spirit offered a tree to every animal on earth. Only the evil hyena was left without one. So when it grumbled, the Great Spirit gave a baobab to the hyena, but on the condition that it changed its horrid ways. Instead of being thankful, the hyena was so angry and disgusted that it flung the baobab high up in the air, where it landed branches first onto the ground. That’s why to this day, with its frayed root-like branches and scrawny leafless twigs, the baobab is known as the ‘upside down tree’. Or as David Livingstone so eloquently put it: ‘that giant upturned carrot’. Even more mortifying is the fact that the core of the sacred baobab’s humongous trunk has been discovered to be particularly good for installing a flush toilet.

  *

  In 2004, a British wildlife artist, renowned for his close-up depictions of the world’s most dangerous animals, died in Kenya’s Great Rift Valley after being ruthlessly gored by a buffalo. Sexagenarian Simon Combes’s only crime was admiring the view from the summit of a nature reserve when the charging buffalo threw him to the ground, stomped on him and ripped open his torso with its horns.

  In 2005, a Malaysian tourist was cycling in Kenya’s Hell’s Gate National Park when a lone buffalo bull took a dislike to him as well. It attacked and horned the man’s skull until he was on the verge of passing out before stamping on him repeatedly. To really drive home the point, so to speak, the buffalo came again for the third time and kicked the bejesus out of him. The wife stood horrified, but had the outstanding nerve to pick up a stone. Just as she was about to throw it at the malicious beast, it went for her. Instinctively, she dove to the ground mere seconds before one ton of bone-crushing bovine weight came down on one of her legs. The buffalo then made a break for it in some dense foliage. Miraculously, the man survived with only head lacerations and a fractured collarbone while his wife recovered after a bout of limping.

  These are but a sample of violent buffalo attacks reported all across Africa. You do not always hear about them in the same breath as lions or crocodiles, but cape buffaloes are one of Africa’s most vicious serial killers. Called ‘Black Death’ by the Maasai tribespeople of Kenya, the cape buffalo is responsible for nearly as many human deaths as the hippopotamus. Fortunately, the victims have mainly comprised big game hunters who deliberately provoke them rather than innocent safari-goers. Still, very few survive a sudden buffalo attack – even courageous lions abstain from buffalo meat if they have enough warthogs in the larder.

  The bad-tempered cape buffalo is a proud card-carrying member of the largely harmless bovid family, but far from a close relative of its docile Asian counterpart, the paddy field-toiling water buffalo. The main distinguishing features of the cape buffalo are its menacing grizzled horns which resemble a courtroom judge’s wig with upturned sideburns. These three-foot long horns curve down and then up, forming a ‘U’ shape of painfully sharp points. Convenient as they may be for stabbing things with, the horns are a tad overkill as the top of its head is already as hard as an anvil, which means all it takes to cause instantaneous death to a person is a single blunt blow to the heart.

  Thus it was with profound obtuseness that I agreed to follow Daniel on what he termed a ‘Close Encounter’: a mondo gonzo speciality of his mobile safaris. That afternoon, as we studiously cocked our heads from side to side across the wide horizon in our unending mission to spot warm-blooded creatures, a blurry line of blackness appeared like a mirage in the muggy sun. It was at once the most enthralling and terrifying sight: a thousand-strong wild buffalo army stretching across the vast plain as far as the eye could see. Two stray buffalo sentinels, standing on the periphery of the feeding herd, caught sight of our silver van lumbering through and raised the alarm.

  ‘Ah, this is perfect for a close encounter!’ Daniel pointed out. ‘Let’s get out here, shall we?’

  Without bothering to wait for a positive reply, he cut the engine and opened his door. Predictably, neither Chan nor Steven wanted to grab this golden opportunity to lose their lives. But sound judgement eluded me, so I followed Daniel out. Even though his lion attack tale was replaying in my mind like a broken record, I did not want to go home without a good story to tell ... provided I was indeed going home. I rationalized it in a way that if I was going to be a goner, I would rather go down memorably: maimed and trampled by a thousand sets of hoofs and horns. That should be a classic story. Mothers the world over would recount my incident as a cautionary tale and I would be immortalized in the minds of petrified little children.

  ‘Remember ... stay close beside me,’ Daniel whispered. I nodded gravely. Step by wary step, we inched towards the buffaloes. In my mind’s eye, I saw us as stealthy predators, creeping up on the buf­faloes unawares. In reality, we were causing a huge racket with all the noisy crackling of dry grass underneath our boots. By now, the entire herd of beefy dark bodies had stopped grazing and stood stock-still, scrutinizing us intently. Gooey secretions that dripped from their moist noses and half-opened mouths festooned their long mugs in the stiff wind, giving them a rabid aura. From this vantage point, I knew immediately that this undertaking wasn’t going to make my Top Ten Smartest Things I’d Ever Done list.

  Since there was nothing around but endless flat plain, we were denied even the remote safety of a thorny thicket or tree. Outrunning the nasty brutes was hopeless as they could reach speeds of 56 kilo­metres per hour (the fastest human can only run 30 kilometres per hour). This was the real deal now – a showdown between us and the slobbering bovines. Every languid, purposeful step we took was followed by a momentary pause to gauge the buffaloes’ mood. I tried hard not to lose my failing composure and resisted the strong urge to make a sudden dash for it. It got increasingly intense. We were within the comfortable killing distance of 20 feet from them and moving closer.

  All of a sudden, with a thunderous rumble of buffalo hoofs, they collectively wheeled around and stampeded away from us. Evidently, they’d paid us a great compliment – rather than treating us as mere imbecilic humans, they considered us an actual threat to their lives. The buffaloes’ retreat also kicked up a huge cloud of dust which was meant to obscure their young. It worked surprisingly well – we could barely see them past the thick fog of battle. I sighed in relief, glad they’d made the decision not to skewer us.

  Daniel was unperturbed. He froze for a few seconds and whistled a long tuneless note. To my bewilderment, the buffaloes reacted to the sound. They stopped kicking up dust and spun back to face us. Daniel went forward cautiously, but I lost my nerve and hid behind him.

  ‘Stay close to me!’ he snapped, startling the crap out of me. ‘Beside me, not behind me!’

  What he meant was stay on the suicide path. I reluctantly obeyed and held my camera in front of my face as
though it were capable of shooting laser rays. We were so frighteningly close now that the buffaloes on the edge of the herd were spilling out of my viewfinder. When we again encroached on their comfort zone, they retreated, but then turned around like they did before when Daniel played buffalo whisperer.

  We engaged in this dangerously foolish whistle-and-turn-back game about four times before Daniel decided that I’d taken enough good photos. Well, photos as good as anyone with trembling hands could take, anyway. If one of the buffalo leaders had picked fight instead of flight, we would’ve surely ended up looking like a plate of spaghetti bolognese – trampled and mashed with bloody innards spilling out of our skins. I was happy to have cheated Death for sure, though I dread the day he demands his money back.

  Ever so slowly, we began to back off, while still carefully keeping the buffaloes within our peripheral vision.

  ‘What did the whistling mean?’ I asked in a hushed voice, as if the buffaloes would overhear us.

  ‘Oh, that was just a simple hello in buffalospeak. It’s my way of communicating to them that we’re harmless and we want to be friends,’ he explained almost convincingly. I didn’t care to analyse if he had just made that up on the spot or if we were just plain lucky. All I cared about was that I was going home ... and I had a damned good story to tell.

  20. ENDGAME

  I was reeling from the thrill of almost getting killed all the way back to Lufupa Lodge. There, we found that our campsite had been invaded by holidaymaking Peace Corps volunteers Kyle and his granny Julie. (All right, so she was a volunteer as well, but she sure looked the part.) They were in Zambia to teach innovative agricultural techniques to natives in remote, unpronounceable areas, and booking into Lufupa was their one and only vacation after nearly a year. Since they were selfless contributors to mankind, we did not kick up a huge fuss. Besides, their shared one-man tent hardly took up much space; in fact, it was so small that poor Kyle had to sleep with his knees bent. He just shrugged and laughed about it, though. I admired his nonchalance – if Chan were in his shoes, she would have nagged my ears off.